This is Jacobin Radio, I'm Suzy Weisman. On today's program, we spend the hour with

such Marxist anthropologist, Don Cald, who has participated in and analyzed the transition

politics of the former Soviet bloc. We speak to him about the state of Putin's war against

Ukraine, and the crucial historical, political, economic, and social background of all of

the actors, not just Russia and Ukraine, but NATO, the US, UK, Germany, and France, even

China, so that we can get a comprehensive analysis of the moment we are in, the relationships

between and within the world's now in motion, and the directions he sees as this war unfolds,

changing the world from this moment forward. All this, when our program returns in just

a moment.

This is Jacobin Radio, I'm Suzy Weisman, and very pleased to have done Cald with us for

the first time. He is in Antwerp, and he's an expert on Central and Eastern Europe.

I'll get back to who he is and what he is, but we're going to be talking about the

war in Ukraine. We're now in what is day 10, as we record this, of Putin's war on Ukraine,

and we can point to several important takeaways already. One is that everything has changed,

and this war really marks the end of an historical period, I think, and the beginning of another

in process of becoming. Everything that Putin has railed against and said he wanted to

prevent, he has precipitated by his actions with his decision to go to war with Ukraine.

So Ukrainians have been divided by region, age, language, and history, and now are united

against Russia. NATO, the Cold War Alliance, that lost its race on detra with the disintegration

of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, yet persisted because, as we know, bureaucracies

find a way to keep going. And now it has gained and come together in ways not seen in decades,

with even the majority of the populations of Finland and Sweden now indicating that they

...